Romanticism, Medicine, and the Poet's BodyRoutledge, 2016 M04 8 - 174 pages That medicine becomes professionalized at the very moment that literature becomes "Romantic" is an important coincidence, and James Allard makes the most of it. His book restores the physical body to its proper place in Romantic studies by exploring the status of the human body during the period. With meticulous detail, he documents the way medical discourse consolidates a body susceptible to medical authority that is then represented in the works of Romantic era poets. In doing so, he attends not only to the history of medicine's professionalization but significantly to the rhetoric of legitimation that advances the authority of doctors over the bodies of patients and readers alike. After surveying trends in Romantic-era medicine and analyzing the body's treatment in key texts by Wordsworth and Joanna Baillie, Allard moves quickly to his central subject-the Poet-Physician. This hybrid figure, discovered in the works of the medically trained John Keats, John Thelwall, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, embodies the struggles occasioned by the discrepancies and affinities between medicine and poetry. |
Contents
Romanticizing Bodies | |
Wordsworth Baillie and the Romantic Body | |
Embodying Romanticisms | |
Keats and the Poets Body | |
Flesh Souls and Transgression in Beddoess | |
Coda | |
Works Cited | |
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anatomist anatomy Animal Vitality anxieties Apollo apothecary argues attend Baillie Baillie’s Beddoes’s bodily body consciousness body politic body’s Brown claims concern contemporary Cooper critical crucial Cullen death Death’s Fool Death’s Jest-Book debates discussion disease dissection drama effect embodied emphasis engagements figures foreground Furthermore Goellnicht Göttingen Guy’s human Hunter Hyperion poems idea identity important Introductory Discourse Isbrand Joanna Baillie John Keats John Thelwall Keats’s Kelsall knowledge language lectures letters literary London Corresponding Society Lyrical Ballads Mandrake manifested material medical studies medical theory medicalized body medicine and poetry mind nature nosology notions particular passage passions perhaps Peripatetic Peripatetic Philosopher physical physician physiology play Poet Poet-Physician Poet’s poetry and medicine Porter practice practitioners reform relation rhetoric of legitimacy Romantic Century Romanticism Samuel Taylor Coleridge scientific sensibility Shelley soul student suggest surgeon surgery Sylvanus texts theater Thelwall’s Thomas Beddoes Thomas Lovell Beddoes treatment vols Wolfram words Wordsworth writings Ziba